Focus on earlier blaze in Quebec train derailment

Maude Verrault, a waitress at downtown's Musi-Cafe, was outside smoking when she spotted the blazing train barreling toward her.

"I've never seen a train moving so fast in my life, and I saw flames ... Then someone screamed 'the train is going to derail!' and that's when I ran," Verrault said. She said she felt the heat scorch her back as she ran from the explosion, but was too terrified to look back.

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The derailment raised questions about the safety of Canada's growing practice of transporting oil by train, and was sure to bolster arguments that a proposed oil pipeline running from Canada across the U.S. — one that Canadian officials badly want — would be safer.

The train's owners, Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway, said they believed brake failure was to blame.

Nantes Fire Chief Patrick Lambert said that when the same train caught fire hours prior to the accident, the engine was shut off per the standard operating procedure dictated by Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway.

The blaze was extinguished within about 45 minutes. And that's where the fire department's involvement ended, Lambert said.

"The people from MMA told us, 'That's great — the train is secure, there's no more fire, there's nothing anymore, there's no more danger,'" Lambert told reporters. "We were given our leave, and we left."

Edward Burkhardt, the president and CEO of the railway's parent company Rail World, Inc., suggested that the decision to shut off the locomotive to put out the fire might have disabled the brakes. "An hour or so after the locomotive was shut down, the train rolled away," Burkhardt told the Canadian Broadcast Corp.

Meanwhile, crews were working to contain 100,000 liters (27,000 gallons) of light crude that spilled from the tankers and made its way into nearby waterways. There were fears it could flow into the St. Lawrence River all the way to Quebec City.

Quebec's Environment Ministry Spokesman Eric Cardinal said officials remained hopeful they could contain more than 85 per cent of the spill.